The Turner House in Pittsford, Monroe County, New York is a Greek Revival house, which was built around 1840 in Henrietta, New York.[1] Richard and Nancy Turner bought the house in 1956 and paid for moving the house from Henrietta to a nearby location in Pittsford.[2] The house is located on an estate of 6 acres (2.428 hectares) with a garden, designed and developed in the 1960s by the famous landscape architect Fletcher Steele. The garden was Steele's last major landscaping project.[3]
What is now called the "Turner House" was formerly called the "Elihu Kirby House". At the age of nineteen, Elihu Kirby (1801–1866) came to Henrietta, New York, and by his late twenties became a success in general merchandising. His imposing house was completed by the early 1840s and he lived there until his death. After his death, his family sold the house.[4] [5] [6]
In the early 1950s Richard and Nancy Turner settled in Rochester, New York. The couple, interested in historical preservation, bought the Elihu Kirby House and in 1956 decided that area near the historic house was becoming too commercialized. Therefore, they hired a Weedsport company to move the structure to a vacant lot they owned in Pittsford.[7] (The vacant lot purchased by the Turners was selected by the landscape architect Katherine Wilson Rahn[2] (1915–1992), a Fellow of the American Society of Landscape Architects.[8] A barren cornfield and an abandoned quarry occupied the vacant lot.[9]) The company's workers cut the structure into two sections, each weighing roughly 40 tons.[2] The two section were transported by two trailers to the new location, which was about 3½ miles (5.63 km) away from the old location. The transportation took 10 days,[7] because power lines had to be avoided, the load weight was too much for some roads, and the two trailers had to be pulled over some roadless land. The transportation gained some press coverage, especially when one of the structure-hauling trailers became mired in the mud of a cornfield[7] and when one power line was severed. The downed power line caused some baseball fans to lose their television coverage of a World Series game.[2] However, the transportation was a success, and the two structural sections were successfully rejoined.[7]
In the 1960s the Turners hired Fletcher Steele, who was living in Pittsford, to design a garden for the grounds of the relocated house. Most of the garden's original development occurred from 1964 to 1968.[3]